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I have been out on the speakers circuit quite a bit lately speaking about business social strategy. One of the areas I place quite a bit of emphasis on is what a company needs to consider BEFORE they begin strategy development. Often times, a business creates a social asset in an effort to play catch up with the marketplace and then fails to see positive and sustainable results because they either didn’t have a strategy or their strategy was built on bad assumptions and/or a lack of addressing fundamental concerns. It is imperative to research, acknowledge and address these concerns within your strategy for any chance of buy-in and ultimately, success. The most common concerns we hear from our clients are:

Resources (time and money)

Security (spam, viruses, access)

Rapid Change (is facebook the next myspace?)

Control (what if they say something bad? what if my employee plays farmville all day?)

These are all valid and real concerns and as you think about how to address them, you will often find you are starting to develop your strategic and tactical measures. For example here are just a few we have recommended in the past:

Identify early adopters in the organization as initial resources to expedite the learning curve

Work with your IT team and system experts to understand how to minimize security risk

Understand all of your account settings and have them set according to your standards (Did you know Facebook allows you to block out anywords you define from being posted on your wall?)

Once you have reviewed and addressed concerns, you need to establish your company baseline in the areas of Market, Brand and Financials. Becoming social doesn’t solve your problems or save the day. Becoming social shines a light on all you do well and all you don’t. Therefore, it is imperative to know what is working and what isn’t before you shine the light.

Market

Who is your target audience? What are their demographics? What do they think of you? What are they saying about you today? Understanding your market allows you to consider areas you may need to focus on fixing (poor product performance) before telling people how great it is. More importantly, understanding your market points to where should you listen and possibly engage online…forums, blogs, third-party review sites, social networks, etc.

Brand

What is your brand? What does it stand for? How is it visually represented and is it consistent through all of your marketing assets? If you have three different logos, competing key messages and a confused market because field marketing doesn’t appreciate the corporate team you need to get that resolved before adding more social assets to the situation.

Financials

How are you making money? How are you spending money? What are you getting for what you are spending? If you aren’t tracking return on investment today then how will you know if your social media investment is proving fruitful? Most companies don’t get an increase in budget to start social efforts so knowing what efforts are trending downward in results can be a good place to transition expense dollars.

Now that the concerns and baseline have been established, you are ready to define the strategy. In addition to what has beens shared, you may want to consider the following items in your strategic plan (this list is just a start):

Who will be the Executive Champion? It needs to be someone who can drive change, be accountable, open to experimentation, a comfortability to saying yes more than no, and challenge his/her peers to review results AND adjust accordingly.

Who are the resources? Define time, behavior, performance, training, and policy expectations.

What processes, policies, training needs to be updated and/or implemented? Define customer touch-points, identify processes that need to be altered (i.e. lead funnel process needs to capture social assets of leads), and determine training requirements.

What are the success metrics? Results/KPIs/reports may need to be updated to reflect relational trends between social actions and lead generation/customer retention.

Listening, communication and being open-minded are critical skills that need to be utilized with preparing a social strategy. The learning and awareness that comes with preparation not only helps create a successful social strategy but often times makes a significant impact to overall business improvement and results.